Personal mobile communication/computing devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and two-way pagers, have become commonplace in many countries. These devices can be collectively referred to as “mobile devices”. Many of the latest generation of mobile devices provide their users with the ability to access resources on the Internet via wireless telecommunications networks (or simply, “wireless networks”). For example, some of these mobile devices allow their users to access World Wide Web pages, exchange email and download files over the Internet. Devices which can access the World Wide Web (“the Web”) include a software application called a browser, which when implemented in a small (e.g., handheld) mobile device is sometimes more precisely referred to as a “minibrowser” or “microbrowser”. An example of such a browser is the Openwave Mobile Browser produced by Openwave Systems Inc. of Redwood City, Calif.
Currently there is substantial interest in providing better ways for users to access published content and application services from their mobile devices. The term “content” in this context can refer to essentially any kind of information, such as text, images (e.g., graphics, photos, animations), video, sound, etc. One specific type of content, for example, is a Web page. There is significant interest in allowing users to browse the Web from mobile devices more efficiently. Current technology has a number of shortcomings in this regard, which discourage users from using the Web browsing capabilities of their mobile devices.
Specifically, a user of a mobile device (e.g., a mobile phone) has to memorize an address or URL (universal resource locator) of a network-based resource (e.g., a Web page) associated with another entity (e.g., another mobile device). In addition, given the limited keypad features of a mobile device, it is a burden for a user of a mobile device to remember the URL and to type in the URL using a keypad of the mobile device in order to access a Web page published by another entity from the mobile device.